The growth in data transmitted over wireless and cable networks has been driving consolidation of broadband operators, and creating a highly competitive global broadband service provision market. “Operator” refers to an operator of a high-speed network that offers data transfer services over one or more types of networks (e.g.: mobile networks and other wireless networks, wired networks, including telephone, cable satellite, and mobile networks, or a combination of these). “Broadband service” includes content delivered over a network; the network may be wired, wireless, cable, DSL, or other digital communication systems, or any combination thereof.
Operators are evolving and becoming broadband service providers (referred to herein as “service providers”). Triple or quad operators means operators that provide three or four services, such as residential Internet service, residential phone service, residential television, and mobile data services, which may in turn, include voice, Internet, and television. Data usage over both wireless, DSL and cable networks around the world is growing. Service providers may grow revenue by offering users a variety of services, and by reducing the cost of the network operation centers (“NOCs”) and the cost of data links. Today, service providers are offering more services and applications, requiring larger NOCs, which in turn translates to higher operating costs for the service providers and therefore lower average revenue per user (“ARPU”). Service providers are looking for solutions that allow them to run smaller NOCs, offer services suited to users' profiles and the type of device that the user is using at the time (e.g.: television (“TV”), laptop computer, desktop computer, pads, eReaders, or smartphone).
Today, service providers can often identify where users are located, but it is difficult to know what type of content users want based on their context. “Context” includes information about the nature of the user and content, including: information that refers to the user's location; the type of device the user is using to access the network; the level of connectivity access the user has; the user state, which includes information such as whether the user is connected to the network using a mobile or wired connection; whether the user is accessing the network from home or while traveling (e.g.: on vacation or on a business trip); to which networks the user is connected; and the user's interests and history.
User demand for accessing media-rich content in real time is growing; concurrently, the types of devices that are used to view such media-rich content are also growing. Broadband networks resulted from the migration of multiple networks, each having different characteristics and operating as silo networks wherein devices, applications, and networks are tightly coupled. Typical broadband networks are designed based on the assumption that user devices used to access content are dumb terminals with little ability to run rich multimedia applications. Typical broadband networks were also designed under the assumption that traffic growth will remain linear, which has been an underestimate.
Conventional solutions to satisfying user demands for delivery of rich multimedia content in real-time has centered on a “core-centric” approach in which a centralized server resides within a NOC for each different type of network; an exemplary “core-centric” network 100 is depicted in FIG. 1. This means that if a service provider is operating broadband networks to deliver TV content, residential Internet content and cellular phone content to specific user devices, then such service providers would use three different NOCs, TV NOC 250, Internet NOC 350 and cellular NOC 450, respectively. Each is directed to a particular type of user device, which usually do not share networks or content, for example, the user's laptop computer cannot use the cellular phone's cellular network to access content. Likewise the cellular phone cannot access the cable network.
In such a model, a service provider uses software and servers that offer functionality such as determining the automatic bit rate (“ABR”), providing content inspections, and providing personalization engines that are installed within each NOC. Challenges arise when employing these approaches and serving large numbers, e.g. millions, of users; shortcomings associated with these approaches include scalability issues, accuracy issues, and synchronization of collected information. As depicted in FIG. 1 a triple and quad player operator is managing multiple NOCs 250, 350 and 450, and within each NOC is run the same set of services including video transcoding and transrating engines, content reformatting, caching and proxy services.
Three changes are simultaneously occurring with respect to broadband networks. The first relates to digital content. The amount of content available on the Internet is overwhelming for end users, even very technically savvy users, and the amount of content is still growing exponentially. This includes on-demand digital video streaming, television services such as video on demand (“VoD”), subscription video on demand (“SVoD”) and pay-per-view (“PPV”). Also included in this market is on-line video advertising, Internet protocol television (“IPTV”) and mobile TV, as well as television provided through cable, digital cable set top boxes, and satellite. References to “television” or “TV” herein shall refer to any of the above listed streaming video services.
The second relates to the effect of a new generation of users and their needs. These new users (often referred to as “Millennials”), represent the most populous generation that has ever lived on this planet. They tend to be technology-centric, and both dependent on and aware of technology. On average, each spends over $100 per week on technology-oriented products and services and directly influences over 80% of the spending in the home. This is the generation that wants the right information suited to their needs and context, delivered in the least amount of time. This group of users are socially connected through their mobile phone, laptop and desktop computers, and are the driving force behind enabling connectivity through TV. This generation wants to have personalized content; namely, content that is available on their own terms rather than on the terms of service providers and operators. This is the generation that does not want to be bound to a particular location or device to access specific content. They like to be able to watch TV content on any device and location within and outside of the home and not just on a TV display. They also want to be able to access Internet content and/or social networking services such as Twitter on their TV display while watching TV. They are not only content consumers but also content generators and distributors.
The third relates to advancements in technology, and particularly advancements in customer premises equipment (“CPE”). A household often no longer just has a single TV display and a PC but may have multiple laptops and PCs, along with TV displays and mobile devices, such as smart phones, cellular phones, video game devices, net books, electronic reading tools (“eReaders”), pads, and portable music and video players, that are used in or outside of their homes (collectively, referred to herein as “user devices”). Additionally, users often have access to other user devices such as home residential gateways, set-top-boxes, routers, Wi-Fi access points and other networking equipment, and the use and availability of such equipment is growing rapidly. These changes mean that content is no longer created, controlled and distributed by a specific organization, such as service providers, but instead content can be produced by anyone within a network and either pushed to, or requested by, anyone within the network. Such content includes place shifted video content, multimedia streams, and personal digital content. Therefore, a centralized approach wherein content is always produced by a selected entity and then distributed to subscribers will no longer be effective due to variation between user interests, and because many users wish to play a more active role in generating content. Additionally, to centralize all content being created for distribution also will not be effective due to the heavy network traffic that would result from distributing such content.
Shortcomings associated with the prior art include:                1. Pre-formatted content storage any types of device        Users' content preferences are very different, when, for example, they are outside of home, than when they are in front of their big TV screen. Deciding on storing the type of content for possible access from outside of home is therefore difficult. Also keeping multiple formats suitable for all potential user devices that may be used to experience the content is not efficient. Typical user devices renew and update data displays very quickly and therefore repeatedly mining data and archiving different formats for possible access by different user devices is cumbersome, costly and inefficient.        2. Content Inspection        The data traffic path for the user is not always the same. The purpose of content inspection is to identify the user's interests. However, the user's interest is best determined based on user habits over a period of time and not solely based on a snapshot of the user's current content usage. Distributing content inspection over multiple network nodes provides a snapshot of the user's current usage based only on the current traffic flow. Storing all traffic flows, determining the user identity, synchronizing the information for a post content inspection process in order to inspect usage over a longer period of time requires large amounts of storage, and extensive processing time. This is highly costly and inefficient. Conventional means allow the type of content the user is looking at any given moment in time to be determined, rather than a long term view. Consequently, the real preferences of the user under different conditions cannot be predicted accurately.        
In the prior art, a CPE only facilitates providing CPE specific and vertical functions, e.g. a CPE that only provides Set-Top-Box functionality or a CPE that provides Internet connectivity functionality. Furthermore, in conventional methods the CPE has no role in content distribution functionality among subscribers while they are at home or outside using different methods of connectivity and in delivering content concurrently to different devices and/or users in parallel.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a method and system that improves on the deficiencies of the prior art.